Development / Production Recommended Workflow?

[Simon Harrison]

Hello. Are patches a recommended way of keeping dev and production
directories in sync?

I have local Mercurial repo's but for production I just dump the
directory on a server and then run from my local repo:

$ hg export -r tip > tip.patch

and then run the patch on the server. It's certainly an improvement on
my old way of manually changing the files on the server, but it
still feels a bit clunky. 

What's the current best practice for this sort of thing? 

Thanks

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